Policy Making at the Fore as Big Funds Seek to Improve Schools

The growing and increasingly controversial role of the country’s biggest charitable foundations in shaping U.S. education policy is examined in the cover story of the October edition of Governing magazine.

While following a long philanthropic tradition of schools-focused giving, charities founded by business billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family take a much more active role than their predecessors in shaping the education agenda, financing advocacy efforts and tying grants to projects such as charter schools, national curriculum standards, or new hiring and retention criteria for teachers.

Teachers’ union and some education experts question the growing influence of a small group of wealthy donors on national policy, but the foundations and their supporters say the policy-focused, hands-on approach is necessary to achieve success that has eluded well-financed past programs.

Said Erica Lepping, communications director at the Broad Foundation, in Los Angeles: “If you are a foundation like ours, with a mission to support dramatic improvements in student achievement, then you have to dig deeper sometimes to get at the core causes of why we haven’t seen improvements.”

Read more: See The Chronicle’s overview of education efforts by donors and an opinion article questioning the role of billionaires in education policy.